The Problem Of Aryan Origins

Chapter Two

The Supposed Aryan Invasion

The first question has to be considered under two heads: archaeological and literary.

In an article of 1966, "The Decline of the Harappans", G.R. Dales, director of archaeological fieldwork in South Asia, particularly in West Pakistan, for a good number of years, wrote in connection with the topic of an Aryan invasion of India: "The Aryans... have not yet been identified archæologically."¹ Even a diehard defender like Sir Mortimer Wheeler of the Aryan-invasion hypothesis and of the theory that the Rigvedic Aryans destroyed the Harappā Culture had to state: "It is best to admit that no proto-Aryan material culture has yet been identified in India."² This statement was made in 1959. In 1970, following up some cool-headed remarks on the copper-hoards unearthed in the Gangetic basin and hastily ascribed to Aryan invaders, Wheeler refers to some other ascriptions: "...certain Iron Age cairn-burials in northern Baluchistan have been regarded in some sense as 'Aryan'. A series of Moghul Ghundai produced a distinctive tripod jar, a bracelet, bells, rings, and arrowheads, all of bronze, of types characteristic of 'Sialk B' in Persia and attributable to the period before and after 1000 B.C. The association of these groups with early bearers of the Aryan tongue is without warrant. If a word of warning is appropriate, it is on the desirability of avoiding an excessively Aryan 'preoccupation'."³ The sense of negative results is still strong.

Perhaps the most favoured candidate in the public's eye for the preoccupation against which we are cautioned has

1.Scientific American, New York, May 1966, p. 95.

2.Early India and Pakistan (Bombay, 1959), p. 126.

3.In the revised part dealing with prehistoric India in the Third Edition (1970) of The Oxford History of India by the Late Vincent A. Smith, edited by Percival Spear. p. 34.

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been the Painted Grey Ware - PGW for short - found at a large number of sites in the Gangetic Valley. Presently it is considered datable even close to c. 1500 B.C. at Bhagwan-pura in the Kurukshetra district of Haryana rather than to c. 800 B.C. as elsewhere before. The Bhagwanpura PGW material is mixed with Late Harappān remains, but the issue relating to this mixture we shall touch upon at another place. At the moment we are concerned with the fact that, although the pronouncements of Dales and Wheeler are not belied by any characteristic find here, a certain blurring suggestion which has long lingered may seem strengthened. When PGW was first reported in 1954-55 at several spots linked traditionally with the Mahābhārata War as well as in the locale where the Rigvedic Aryans had lived, it was put substantially in line with the ceramic of the Shahi Tump cemetery in South Balūchistān which archæologists had assigned to about the middle of the second millennium B.C., just the time postulated for the Aryan dispersal eastward. Shahi Tump could therefore be pictured as a side-track milestone on the way of invading Aryans, with their PGW culture, to India. But a few years later H.D. Sankalia came out with the authoritative information not only that the PGW of Shahi Tump was quite different in purpose, shape, design and consistency from the type in India but also that the two types were chronologically wide apart.⁴

Subsequent stratified excavations at Bampur in Sistan and at Tepe Yahya in South Irān have helped to set right what in the absence of proper excavation could not hitherto be ascertained at Shahi Tump: namely, the exact relation between PGW there and the Harappā Culture whose relics were seen on the surface as well as below. This PGW, which used to be regarded as later, is now declared to be earlier.

4. Op. cit. (see fn. 1), p. 403, col. 2 and p. 323, col. 2. The comparative study was done at first hand from the Safdarjung collection at New Delhi. The chronology derives from Richard H. Meadow et. al., "Problems in the Culture History of Baluchistan and South-eastern Iran" (cyclostyled copy).

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Sankalia tells us that the Harappā Culture is placed in the second half of the third millennium B.C. and the Shahi Tump Culture in the first half of the same millennium. Hence a gap of well over a thousand years separates and disconnects Shahi Tump's PGW from the most ancient specimens of such a ceramic in India. No sign exists that the bearers of the latter arrived from abroad.

Wheeler's warning is anticipated by implication when Bridget and Raymond Allchin, referring to "archæological evidence... both in Iran and India and Pakistan", confess: "indeed it almost always lacks any clear hallmarks to establish its originators as Indo-Europeans."⁵ Still they venture to press a case for them in more than one form. It looks its strongest in relation to certain signs which they consider typical of Aryan presence: copper pins with spiral loops, animal-headed pins, shaft-hole axes and adzes. They point to the upper levels of Mohenjo-dāro where was found "the copper shaft-hole axe-adze, whose Iranian parallels date from c. 1800 to 1600 B.C." They also note that the Irānian examples "compare with those from Maikop and Tsarakaya in South Russia" of about the same date. Again, we learn: "A bronze animal-headed pin found at Harappā near the surface in area J suggests connexions with western Iran and the Caucasus between 1500 and 2000 B.C." These discoveries are taken as testimony to "the proximity of foreign barbarians": Aryan invaders. But the authors soon land themselves in self-contradiction. They inform us about Mohenjodāro: "The bronze pin with spiral loop, found by Mackay at a depth of 18.4 feet in the DK area, must indicate an earlier importation, and so too may the animal-headed pin discovered in the same part of the site." We may supplement the information with Stuart Piggott's news: "...at Mohenjodāro a... clay model was found at a low level,

5. The Birth of Indian Civilization: India and Pakistan before 500 B.C. (A Pelican Original, Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 145. In the citations that follow, the pages involved are 145-47, 106 and 140.

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which... seems to represent a form of shaft-hole axe..."⁶ Hence the late finds are shown up as absolutely inconclusive for the Allchin thesis. They could be importations as well. Even a greater number of them could be such, since these objects were more abundantly manufactured between 2000 and 1500 B.C.

Our refutation is strengthened by what the Allchins record of South Afghānistān's ancient site Mundigak. Copper pins with spiral loops appear in its late period IV, but "related types are reported already in II, while shaft-hole axes and adzes are already present in III. 6". The earlier periods are assuredly pre-Harappān, for, according to the Allchins, period IV itself is only "in its later phase... contemporary with the Harappān period" which starts in c. 2500 B.C. or, if we credit the Allchins' chronology, 2250 B.C. Thus in India's neighbourhood no less than in her own Indus Valley the time of Maikop and Tsarakaya as well as of late Irānian sites is left far behind for the signs presumed to be of newly arrived Aryan invaders. The signs precede them by a substantial number of centuries.

Walter Fairservis, Jr. meets with no better success in the claim for Aryanism he staked on behalf of a people about whom he wrote at some length in 1971.⁷ Their remains at Swat (West Pākistān) were first reported by C.S. Antonini in 1963 and afterwards in the Gandhāra plain by A.H. Dani in 1967. As all the sites were cemeteries, Dani coined the label "Gandhara Grave Culture". The Swat material starts in "the first quarter of the second millennium B.C.", while the Gandhāran dates from "the late second millennium", and both continue down to the sixth or fifth century B.C. Fairservis comments:

"The Gandhara Grave Culture is a good candidate for a representative of the 'Aryans.' Horses, horse furniture, contacts with Inner Asia [Tepe Hissar II B], suggestion of

6.Prehistoric India (A Pelican Book, Harmondsworth 1960), p. 198.

7.The Roots of Ancient India: The Archæology of Early Indian Civilization (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1971), pp. 354-58.

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high capability in metallurgy, etc., plus the chronology, and indeed the direction given in the ancient literary accounts, make such candidacy viable. However, it is a candidacy only, since the archæological work in this important region is only just coming into its own in Dani's capable hands.

"The literary evidence, as B.B. Lal among others has shown, is there. The Rig-veda, the earliest account, tells of the coming of new people to the north-west; the Mahabharata stories record the movement to the middle Ganges Valley; the Ramayana is the final episode, which sees Bengal, Orissa, and Ceylon within the geographical bounds of the Vedic tradition however defined. Broadly reviewed, the literary trail is a good one."

Fairservis, it is clear, leans heavily on "the literary evidence". Archaeologically, he does not feel any too confident. A link with Inner Asia does not mean much. According to Fairservis himself, phases 4 and 5 of the first period of Mundigak in South Afghānistān, considerably pre-dating the second millennium B.C., and also the Quetta wares of Central Balūchistān, belonging again to an early epoch, have pottery equivalents in the early Hissar culture.⁸ These equivalents are not seen to raise any Aryan issue. In fact, it is only the presence of the horse, over and above that of the cow, which can create the presumption of Aryanism for the Gandhāra Grave Culture. But the horse should hardly come as the sign of an Aryan invasion from outside India unless one could prove the utter absence of this animal in the Indian subcontinent before the period into which the Gandhāra Grave Culture fits. As the invasion is posited at c. 1500 B.C., the question reduces itself most directly to whether the Harappā Culture which ended at this date knew the domesticated horse.

From the very beginning a sheer negative answer was impossible. A.D. Pusalker spoke of the model of an animal, found in an early stratum of Mohenjo-dāro, which E.J.H.

8. Ibid., p.127

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Mackay had taken as the representation of a horse.⁹ Sankalia marked in the very first phase at the Harappān site Lothal in Saurashtra a terracotta figurine of an equine with a thick short unmistakably horselike tail and with the whole head very much like that of equus caballus.¹⁰ S.S. Rao referred to the terracotta model of a horse discovered at Rangpur as well and mentioned, too, "a painted potsherd from Rojdi depicting a human figure leading a horse".¹¹ So there was always ground to cast doubt on the invaders' role allotted to the Gandhāra Grave Culture. But now the controversy is set entirely at rest by the excavations carried out in 1965, 1967 and 1968 under J.P. Joshi at Harappān Surkotada in Kutch.¹² For, among the animals "which were either domesticated or were in the process of domestication", the excavators discovered not only the "ass (Equus onager indicus)" but also the "horse (Equus caballus Linn.)". Joshi writes: "The Harappans of Surkotada knew Equus right from the time of their arrival at Surkotada." He also tells us: "A lot of equine bones right from earlier to top levels have been recovered. A majority of them are phalanges and teeth." Thus the possession of horses by the Gandhāra Grave Culture cannot distinguish the people of it uniquely as Aryan invaders. They might easily be Indian borderlanders on the move.

The historical implication of horse-knowledge by Indians in the Harappān age is a point we shall take up elsewhere. Our immediate task is to expose the inadequacy of Fairservis's brief. And what renders his invasion-idea particularly inapplicable here is the overall impression the archæo-

9."The Indus Valley Civilization", The Vedic Age, edited by R.C. Majumdar and A.D. Pusalker (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1952), p. 194.

10.Indian Archaeology Today (Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1962), p. 61.

11.Op. cit. (see fn. 1), pp. 89, 124.

12."Exploration in Kutch and Excavation at Surkotada and New Light on Harappān Migration", Journal of the Oriental Institute (M.S. University of Baroda), Vol. XII, Sept-Dec. 1972, Nos. 1-2, pp. 135-138, 136.

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logical evidence gives as compared to the literary one as he understands it. The latter, to his mind, depicts the Aryan invasion as a martial push into India; the former provides a different picture:

"It was probably not an invasion of hordes of Central Asian nomads who in great and overwhelming waves swept from the steppes to the Doab. It is more likely that Indo-European-speaking pastoral tribes of a variety of traditions and probably of a diversity of ethnic background gradually infiltrated the fertile plain from Peshawar to the Punjab. This pattern of movement is more characteristic of pastoral peoples than the great migration historians are prone to dramatize. As pastoralists they may have established traditional seasonal routes but at least initially were unlikely to settle in large permanent sedentary settlements. Thus their traces archæologically are less likely to be in terms of habitation and more likely to be necropoli or even isolated monuments."

Surely, if this is all that we can surmise on archaeological grounds, the Gandhāra Grave Culture may, again, be of borderland Indians peacefully passing. One has to look entirely to the literary account to prove it a genuine invader. But does this account really help Fairservis's claim? Here the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana have no true bearing: they have nothing to do with a movement into India from outside. We have to attend solely to the Rigveda, "the earliest account", in which Fairservis and his sources see "the coming of new people to the north-west" as foreign conquerors.

What precisely is the literary situation? How do careful and meticulous scholars read it? The very proponents of the invasion-hypothesis cannot deny that the Rigveda supplies no clue to any migration. Thus E.J. Rapson, speaking of the Aryans in the period of this scripture, admits: "Their oldest literature supplies no certain indication that they still retained the recollection of their former home; and we may reasonably conclude therefore that the invasion which

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brought them into India took place at a date considerably earlier...."¹³ Thus, on Rapson's authority, we cannot base on the hymns the story of Rigvedic Aryans hailing from another country and invading the Indus Valley.

The Cambridge History of India, from which we have quoted Rapson, has further to say through A.B. Keith: "It is certain... that the Rigveda offers no assistance in determining the mode in which the Vedic Aryans entered India... If, as may be the case, the Aryan invaders of India entered by the western passes of the Hindu Kush and proceeded thence through the Punjab to the east, still that advance is not reflected in the Rigveda, the bulk at least of which seems to have been composed rather in the country round the Sarasvatī river, south of the modern Ambālā".¹⁴ Thus, according to Keith, there is in the Rigveda not only a total omission of pointers to a movement into India from abroad but also a marked sign that whatever story its composers tell is from a position as of inlanders and not invaders.

S.K. Chatterji, another supporter of the invasion-theory, has to concede: "There is no indication from the Rigveda that the Aryans were conscious of entering a new country when they came to India."¹⁵ Chatterji proffers the explanation that the Aryans were unconscious because the non-Aryan peoples they found in India were not different from those they had known in Eastern Irān, whence they are supposed to have migrated after a halt there in their journey from farther afield. The excuse is patently inadequate. Even if the non-Aryan peoples inside India were like those outside whom the invaders may have known, the country entered is not thereby rendered such that the invading tribes would never refer to it as a new land reached from another country.

B.K. Ghosh remarks: "It really cannot be proved that the Vedic Aryans retained any memory of their extra-Indian

13."Peoples and Languages", The Cambridge History of India, edited by E.J. Rapson, 1922, p. 43.

14."The Age of the Rigveda", ibid., p. 79.

15."Race-movements and Prehistoric Culture", The Vedic Age, p. 157.

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associations, except perhaps a camouflaged reminiscence of their sojourn in Irān."¹⁶ The concluding phrase refers to the names Rasā, Sarasvatī and Bahlīka, which Ghosh takes to be Irānian ones Indianised and applied to two Indian rivers and one Indian province.¹⁷ But surely ancient Irānian and Indian Sanskrit were allied languages and several common terms are to be expected. Besides, Irān and India were close neighbours and some linguistic borrowing either way would not be surprising. What is indeed surprising is that in spite of linguistic affinities and neighbourly nearness the express signs of connection with Irān should be as good as nil in India's oldest literature - except perhaps for the tribes Prithu-Parśu (Parthians-Persians rather than "those with large ribs" or "those with broad axes"?). On the hypothesis of a sojourn in Irān the absence of such signs would need a lot of explaining. In fact the absence is so striking that Ghosh, in order to bolster up his hypothesis, has to suppose in addition that the Vedic Aryans deliberately maintained silence about an original Indo-Irānian home outside both India and Iran because a religious and cultural incompatibility had developed between them and the Irānians.¹⁸ But surely no incompatibility could have been present in that home, for else there would have been no sojourn later in Irān with those who afterwards were known as Irānians? Why then an absolute reticence about this home which was extra-Irānian no less than extra-Indian? And why that reticence and not even any word deserving to be alleged as "perhaps a camouflaged reminiscence" of this home when such reminiscence is hypothetised of a sojourn considered to be worth forgetting? Again, is not the reticence in strange contrast to the Irānians' tradition of an ancient Aryan home, Airiyānam vaējo {Erānvēj of the later texts)? The supposed incompatibility between them and the Indians during the latter's "sojourn" in Irān did not prevent the former from

16."The Aryan Problem", ibid., p. 204.

17."Indo-Irānian Relations", ibid., p. 219.

18.Ibid.

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recollecting their cradle-land. How then could it breed absolute reticence in the other party? On all counts Ghosh's excuse is illogical. Unlike the Irānians with their origin outside Irān, the Vedic Aryans for all practical purposes could have had no extra-Indian home.

To the two voices from India we may add a pair of Pākistani proponents of the invasion-hypothesis. A.H. Dani observes: "On the question of the Aryans, there is as yet no conclusive evidence as to either the time of their advent or the road by which they did it."¹⁹ F. Khan has the same thing to say in other words.²⁰ Ambiguity and uncertainty prevail.

A.L. Basham, who too believes in an invasion, is honest enough to confess: "Direct testimony to the assumed fact is lacking, and no tradition of an early home beyond the frontier survives in India." Yet he makes an effort to make good the gap by means of what he designates "historical geography".²¹ He tells us: "The study of the geographical data in the hymns... throws a certain amount of light on the course of the Indo-Aryan migration.... In fact, the accepted belief in the Indo-Aryan immigration from Central Asia depends largely on the interpretation of the geographical allusions in the Rigveda and Yajurveda.... The amount of geographical knowledge implied in the literature is considerable. Such knowledge in those ancient days could have been acquired only by actual travelling."²²

The argument seems queer. Just because actual travel alone could provide such geographical information as the hymns contain, why must we postulate that the Aryans came from Central Asia? Individual travellers could surely bring names of places abroad. These travellers might themselves be Indian Aryans moving out from India and returning with the information. Also, the places abroad could well belong

19.Archæology of Pakistan, V, 1970-71, p. 109.

20.Pakistan Archæology, No. 2, 1965, pp. 39-40.

21.In the revised part dealing with ancient India in The Oxford History of India (1970), from which we have already quoted Wheeler, p. 53.

22.Ibid.

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to other Aryan settlements in contact with the Rigvedic. An interchange of knowledge could occur. In any case a collective immigration from Central Asia is not needed for whatever geographical sense of foreign locales is there. And actually how many Central-Asian names do we have?

Basham does not mention a single one. The example he gives of "a display" of "geographical information" is "the hymn 'In Praise of the Rivers (Nādi-stuti)' in the tenth book (x. 75)", and from this hymn he quotes the fifth stanza which lists "ten streams, small and great", all within India itself and, strangely enough, "in order from east to west", as Basham himself notes,²³ instead of the opposite which we should expect of people who are claimed to have travelled from west to east. When we consider all the rivers listed, we have only a pointer to Afghānistān with the Kubhā (Kabul), Krumu (Kurram), Gomatī (Gomal) and Suvāstu (Swat), suggesting, as R.K. Mookerjee says, "the Indian occupation of Afghanistan in those days".²⁴ The sole index to Central Asia is the naming of the river Rasā in stanza 6. Rasā has been phonetically equated to the Iraniān Ranhā, the river Jaxartes. It is difficult to understand how this reference or any other allusion of a similar sort could illuminate the course of the Indo-Aryan advent from a foreign region. Small contacts with a few foreign parts would be the utmost we might infer.

When the Rigveda and the Yajurveda are compared for their geographical data, we may notice a greater acquaintance with Central and Eastern India in the latter, showing perhaps the shift of the seat of Vedic Civilization more inland. But such a shift would be a matter of internal history and could have no bearing on the question of the Rigvedics hailing in 1500 B.C. from beyond the Afghānistān-Punjāb complex.

The complete want of any hint in the Rigveda of an Aryan

23.Ibid.

24.Hindu Civilization (Bhavan's Book University, Bombay, 1957), Part I, p. 84.

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immigration or invasion cannot be evaded by an appeal to "historical geography". Neither can we plead that this want is isolated and accidental. Basham himself looks outside the Rigveda when he indicates that "no tradition " of a transfrontier home survives in India. Not only the religious books after the Rigveda but also those portions of the Purānas which purport to transmit either legendary or historical information are absolutely silent. "According to tradition al history as recorded in the Purānas," says Pusalker, "India itself is the home of the Aryans, and it was from here that they expanded in different directions to various countries of the world, spreading the Aryan culture."²⁵

Mookerji reports the Purānic pointers a little more elaborately and links them to some Rigvedic signposts, one of which we have already seen from Basham's own account:

"Indian tradition knows nothing of any Aryan invasion of India from north-west and outside of India, nor of any advance of the Aryans from the west to east. On the other hand, it speaks of an Aila outflow, the expansion of the Druhyus through the north-west into the countries beyond. Accordingly, Rigveda X, 75, mentions rivers in their order from the east to the north-west, beginning with the Ganges, in accordance with the course of Aila expansion and its outflow beyond the north-west. Similarly, in the Rigvedic account of the Battle of the Ten Kings against Sūdas who was an Aila king of north Pāñchāla... he is described as pushing his conquest westwards into the Punjāb. This is also in keeping with the view that the bulk of the Rigveda was composed in the Upper Ganges-Jumna doab and plain. The Rigveda holds the Sarasvati especially sacred, and also knows the Sarayu, the river of Oudh."²⁶

In justification of the last statement, which echoes the view of Keith, Mookerji elsewhere explains: "A part of the

25."Cultural Interrelation between India and the Outside World before Asoka", The Cultural Heritage of India (The Ramakrishna Mission, Calcutta, 1958), I, p. 144.

26.Op. dr., I, pp. 182-3.

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Rigveda, the hymns to Ushas, recalls the splendours of dawn in the Punjāb, but a larger part refers to the strife of the elements, thunder and lightning, rain bursting from the clouds and mountains, which are not seen in the Punjāb, but in the region called Brahmāvarta watered by the Sarasvati, the Drshadvati and the Apaya, where the bulk of the Rigveda must have been composed."²⁷

Literary evidence, on which the invasion-theory relies for the notion of a Rigvedic-Aryan entry into India, is one-voiced in its "No". Of course, we need not subscribe to the sweepingness of the Purānic assertion that Aryanism went everywhere from India. Some "outflow" could and must have occurred, but India may not have been the sole habitat of the Aryans. They may have existed spread out in a long belt of which India was one sector. Yet the very fact that tradition al history visualized India as the ur-heimat, cradle-land, of the Aryans is highly meaningful in connection with the Rigvedics.

The conclusion provoked in their context by all these testimonies of archaeologists, historians and literary reporters appears to be unequivocal. To all intents and purposes the Rigvedics were autochthones in India, part of a diverse population going back to a hoary antiquity. This antiquity not only prevented them from making any direct allusion to a source beyond their frontier: it even stood in the way of any explicit expression that though they could not pinpoint their source they had the impression of its having been somewhere abroad.

S. Srikanta Sastri has rightly observed: "Migrating races look back to the land of their origin for centuries. The Parsis of India remember their origin after eight hundred years. The ancient Egyptians and the Phoenicians remembered their respective lands of origin even though they had forgotten their location."²⁸ About the Parsis we may add that their memory extends backwards actually for more than

27.Ibid. pp. 84-5

28."Appendix" to "The Aryan Problem", The Vedic Age, p 216

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thirteen hundreds years, for, as P.P. Balsara says, "from the facts available till today we can conclude that the Parsis of Iran began coming to India for permanent residence from the year 639 at different places and at different periods, and that their first permanent settlement in India was at Sanjan on the west coast in 716...."²⁹ We may also hark back to the Airiyānam vaējo recollected by the ancestors of the Parsis, the ancient Irānians - quite in contrast to their fellow-Aryans across the border. We cannot help agreeing with Sastri's inference: "The Vedic Aryans, if at all they came from outside,...must have lived in the Sapta-Sindhu [the region of the seven rivers in the ancient Punjāb] so many centuries before the Vedic period that they had lost all memory of an original home."³⁰

29.Highlights of Parsi History (Bombay, 1969), p. 29.

30.Loc. cit.

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